Henri Alloul

Henri Alloul (born on November 4, 1942 in Marrakech, Morocco) completed engineering studies and obtained his B.S. in Physics from Ecole Polytechnique, Paris in 1963. In 1968, he received his Ph.D. in Condensed Matter Physics from the University of Paris-Sud Orsay (now part of Paris-Saclay). He moved on to hold a research assistant position at CNRS, Orsay, followed by a post-doctoral position at the Institute of Solid State Physics at Tokyo University, after which he became a research director at CNRS, Orsay.

In 1980, he started teaching as an Associate Professor in Physics at Ecole Polytechnique Palaiseau, and in 1996, he was promoted to Full Professor, for which he was awarded a Chevalier des Palmes Académiques medal (2001). He has been named as a Fellow of the American Physical Society (2008) and was awarded the Great Prize of the French Science Academy and CEA "Science and Innovation" (2012). In 2014, the Physics department of Kazan Federal University (Russia) elected him as a member of the International Scientific Committee of the university and awarded him a Doctor Honoris Causa diploma.

Prof. Alloul has served on the committees of several French and international scientific organizations and has been a referee for multiple international scientific journals. He has published approximately 200 scientific papers and given approximately 100 invited talks at international conferences. In addition, he has co-organized 12 summer schools, international conferences, and workshops. His lectures at Ecole Polytechnique have been published as a textbook by Springer.

Most of Prof. Alloul’s research is directed toward understanding the physics of correlated electron systems. His work is mostly experimental and has benefited from his years-long expertise on nuclear magnetic resonance techniques. He has also taken advantage of the recent development of a variety of new experimental tools directed toward understanding correlated electron physics in layered materials.

His main contributions were initially on the Kondo effect, insulating glasses, spin glasses, and metal--insulator transitions in doped semiconductors. Since the discovery of high-temperature superconductivity, Prof. Alloul has made seminal contributions to our understanding of the physics of the normal state of these materials and on the incidence of impurities and disorder on their phase diagrams. He has also performed detailed studies of the magnetic, superconducting properties and Mott transition in alkali-doped fullerene compounds. NMR/NQR studies allowed him to evidence atomic and charge-order phenomena, which drive a large variety of original physical properties in Na$_x$CoO$_2$ compounds.